Soft shadow rendering in real time

Abstract:

Shadows have become an integral part in today’s applications. Due to the advancement of recent GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) systems, shadows can be implemented in real time. Shadows give us a total picture of the scene and make the applications more realistic. Applications, more likely computer games ask for shadows, to get a precise idea about characters position in the scene. Previously only hard shadows were present, cause of lacking of decent GPUs. Now there are better and more advanced GPU system are available. This makes it possible to design soft shadows in applications. Designing soft shadows asks for complicated algorithms and rendering shadows in real time is trickier. In our paper we kept it real simple to render soft shadows. We have done some basic geometric calculations to achieve the idea about the scene and drawn a hard shadow and then made it soft.